Provenance
Provenance
The only other references to Crete in the New Testament are in the account of Paul’s voyage to Rome in Acts 27, a time when the apostle was briefly in the harbor of Fair Havens (Acts 27:8), but it is impossible to think of him as doing significant evangelism on the island at that time. But from Titus 1:5 we learn that he had left Titus to complete what had to be done, which seems to imply that he had done work there himself and had left Titus to complete it. Unfortunately we have no information as to when this took place. At the time of writing Paul was in or on the way to Nicopolis, where he planned to spend the winter (3:12), but we do not know when he was there either. There are considerable gaps in the story Acts tells of Paul’s missionary journeys, but it is plausibly argued that had he done such a work in Crete as this letter presupposes, it could scarcely have been omitted in its entirety. While certainty is unattainable, it seems probable that, as in the case of 2 Timothy, we should think that Paul was released after the Roman imprisonment narrated in Acts and that he engaged in a further period of missionary activity. Whereas 2 Timothy presupposes a further arrest of Paul, Titus comes from the period of active missionary service.